NEW RELEASE
Fly Away Home - Jennifer Weiner (2010)
Sylvie Woodruff is the poised and gracious senator's wife, with two daughters, Diana and Lizzie. She is so gracious in fact that she still stays with her high-profile husband after he has an affair. Diana and Lizzie are no better off, with their lives also having turmoil of some sort. Physician Diana is married with a son and seems to have it all. However, when temptation arises in the form of a resident doctor, Diana can't resist. Lizzie is a recovering drug addict whose life is turned upside down when she gets pregnant. The story is told by all three women but it doesn't build each character up enough to make the reader want to know what happens to them. It falls flat in parts yet it redeems itself when the three women find solace and comfort in each other - something that was hard for them to do. It's not one of Weiner's best but it's still worth a look. (AS)
Jennifer Weiner's next novel Fly Away Home is about a politician's wife at the centre of a scandal and her two daughters. The summary says: "When Sylvie Serfer met Richard Woodruff in law school, she had wild curls, wide hips, and lots of opinions. Decades later, Sylvie has remade herself as the ideal politician's wife - her hair dyed and straightened, her hippie-chick wardrobe replaced by tailored knit suits. At 57, she ruefully acknowledges that her job is staying 20 pounds thinner than she was in her 20s and tending to her husband, the senator. Lizzie, the Woodruffs' younger daughter, is at 24 a recovering addict, whose mantra HALT (Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?) helps her keep her life under control. Still, trouble always seems to find her. Her older sister, Diana, an emergency room physician, has everything Lizzie failed to achieve - a husband, a young son, the perfect home - and yet she's trapped in a loveless marriage. With temptation waiting in one of the ER's exam rooms, she finds herself craving more. After Richard's extramarital affair makes headlines, the three women are drawn into the painful glare of the national spotlight. Once the press conference is over, each is forced to reconsider her life, who she is and who she is meant to be." Fly Away Home is out in July. You can read the first chapter here. To check if Weiner is coming to an American town near you during her book tour, check out the dates on her blog.
Jennifer Weiner has revealed on her latest blog update that she is just finishing the first draft of her next novel Fly Away Home. Due out mid-year, she says it's about "three very different women - a 54-year-old political wife, a 36-year-old married working mother and an 18-year-old teenager with a secret, who are all coping with relationships in crisis, and who find each other, in a home. By the sea. Where they learn lessons, tell jokes, discover their own strengths, and possibly commit a crime. Not telling yet! Anyhow, there is humor and heartbreak and romance and sex scenes both tender and inadvertently hilarious, plus a passage in which one of the women says that she hates the shape of her husband's head, and observes that once you hate the shape of someone's head, the relationship's in trouble."